This invention relates in general to electronic devices and in particular to communication devices which have a display.
Communication devices such as pagers using present day technology have the capability of giving an alert if a priority or emergency message is received by the pager. For example, a paging feature such as, Priority Override Page, will prioritize an incoming priority page by informing an individual with an audible alert, regardless if his/her pager is set on vibrate or silent mode of operation. For a specific and illustrative example of pagers that provide such priority page override capability, one may refer to U.S. Pat. No. 4,438,433, granted to Smoot, et al., entitled xe2x80x9cMultiaddress Pager with a Call Storage and Priority Page Optionxe2x80x9d, and assigned to the present assignee.
Once a high priority message is received at the pager, even when using a feature such as the priority override page, the high priority message is displayed, if the pager is equipped with a display, using the same technique used for a normal or non-priority message. Messages are retrieved by pressing the xe2x80x9cReadxe2x80x9d key on the pager and scrolling through the received messages that are stored in the pager""s message buffer. Normally, once a message has been read, the message stored in the pager can be deleted in order to make room for new messages.
There is currently however no way to maintain the importance of a high priority message after an individual has recalled the stored message(s) from the pager""s memory message buffer using the xe2x80x9cReadxe2x80x9d key (or some other pager control switch used for such functions). In situations where an important or high priority page is received and can""t be acted upon by an individual for some time (e.g., a few hours) after the message has been read (e.g., individual is preoccupied with some important matter at the time, etc.), he may forget about the message over time. A need thus exists in the art for a method and apparatus which can provide an enhanced alert feature for users of communication devices such as pagers when a priority message is received.